Song of the Week #1: “Fitter Happier” by Radiohead

Fitter. Happier. More productive.

So intones the unnervingly robotic MacInTalk narrator at the start of “Fitter Happier”, the seventh track on Radiohead’s most highly-regarded album, OK Computer (1997). Despite being a little over twenty years old, OK Computer sounds as fresh as it did at the time of its release, and arguably more so: it is a prescient and often harrowing examination of the human relationship to technology and more broadly to consumer capitalism.

It is not uncommon to see Radiohead written off as “sad boy music”, due in large part to the legacy of arguably their biggest hit, “Creep” from Pablo Honey (1993), forever looming in the background, inescapable even as the band reaches dizzier new heights of art-rock and experimentation. “Creep” was in many ways a failed post-grunge experiment created during the stage of Radiohead’s career in which they didn’t know what sort of band they wanted to be. Therefore the song – a schmaltzy and self-deprecating ballad about unrequited love – is considered by the band to be an endless source of embarrassment, almost certainly due to the song’s popularity with the sort of person who shows up to a Radiohead concert just to hear “Creep” and has no interest in hearing anything from post-1993, and also due to the song’s popularity with the sort of person who brings an acoustic guitar to a party and plays it to appear “deep” and “sensitive”.

Nevertheless, the “sad boy” label seems to stick with Radiohead. Of course, this is not entirely on the account of the stereotyping tendency of the mainstream music press: much of Radiohead’s discography is profoundly melancholic and pessimistic: “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” from The Bends (1995) is a sincere memento mori and one of the most nihilistic songs in Radiohead’s entire repertoire. In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, the band’s lead singer Thom Yorke referred to the song as “[T]he dark tunnel without the light at the end. It represents all tragic emotion that is so hurtful that the sound of that melody is its only definition.”

The Bends was Radiohead’s sophomoric album, and without question the one that defined them as a mainstay of British alternative rock. It is, however, by most accounts, a fairly conventional rock album. There’s the occasional odd time signature but it is an album largely devoid of experimentation, preferring to carry itself on melody and lyricism. It was not until their third effort that Radiohead would really begin to gain their reputation for experimentation and weirdness.

Therefore, when OK Computer exploded on to the British music scene in the spring of 1997, it set the British music industry on fire. The record was quite unlike almost anything else that had come out before. Albums like Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible (1994) had certainly laid some of the groundwork, but OK Computer emerged amid a haze of Britpop and New Labour poptimism as a grizzled, cynical look at neoliberal capitalism. While bands like Oasis were rubbing elbows with the likes of Tony Blair, Radiohead were writing songs about anxiety (“Paranoid Android”), disappointment (“Let Down”) and suicide (“No Surprises”).

Which of course brings us on to “Fitter Happier”, which is considered by many to be the “low point” of OK Computer along with the song after it, “Electioneering”. Which seems very strange, because “Fitter Happier” is a sort of tone poem that not only summarises the entire project that OK Computer sets out to present and accomplish, but is also a barometer reading for the political landscape of the late 90s and early 2000s.

The “song” (if “Fitter Happier” can really be considered a “song”) is a little under two minutes long. It consists of nothing more than a robotic voice provided by the Apple MacInTalk application reading out a series of disjointed slogans: “Eating well, no more microwave dinners and saturated fats.” “A safer car, baby smiling in back seat.” “No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants.” “No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows, nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate. Nothing so childish.” “Concerned but powerless. An empowered and informed member of society. Pragmatism not idealism.” It is presented to us over a looped sample of a piano playing and a sample of Jess Osuna in Three Days of the Condor (1975): “This is the Panic Office. Section 9-17 may have been hit. Activate following procedures…”

Indeed, on a first listen the track appears to be little more than filler. None of the members of the band appear on the track in any conventional sense. It is the only track on the album in which Thom Yorke’s vocals are not heard anywhere – by deliberate choice. Yorke was originally supposed to have read out the slogans, but found what he had written so distressing that he had to put it through a computer – a technique he would repeat on the following album Kid A (2000), modulating his voice to dissociate himself from his own disturbing lyrics.

Yet the track is the lynchpin on which the entire album revolves. So much so that the track was originally considered as the album opener, but it was decided to put it roughly in the middle instead, to avoid putting the listener off – a wise decision, as rather than forming an extended introduction to the album, it instead forms the album’s desolate, alienated core.

The track appears to be a take-that at 90s capitalist optimism, and grows more disturbing as it goes on – the satire here is distinctly Juvenalian. For example, near the start of the track there is a description of “baby smiling in back seat”. Towards the end, there is a description of a “shot of baby strapped in back seat”. These two mirrored lines are the simulated non-reality of advertising paired with the horror that lurks behind it. Cars are, after all, little more than metal boxes, powered by explosive vapours, hurtling along stretches of tarmac at such high speeds it is necessary to strap ourselves down in case the box should suffer a mechanical failure or be struck by another metal box. The “baby smiling in back seat” in the car advert is in reality the baby that must be strapped down in our ultra-fast metal death-boxes. “Tyres that grip in the wet” – when did you last have your wheels checked? Are your children safe?

The track also opens and closes with a variation on the words “Fitter, happier, more productive” – opening with “Fitter, happier, more productive – comfortable, not drinking too much”, and closing with “Calm, fitter, healthier and more productive – a pig in a cage on antibiotics”. Once again, it is a mirror image, showing us both the daydream of consumerism – the illusion of free will and free time – and the “dirt behind the daydream”, as Gang of Four put it in “Ether”, the opening track to Entertainment! (1979).

It is worth mentioning also that the track is situated between “Karma Police”, an anthemic lament about alienation and dissatisfaction, and “Electioneering”, which is the album’s most pointedly political track and seems to be aimed squarely at New Labour in close-focus, but also more broadly at neoliberalism. These three tracks, which I term the “Fitter Happier Suite”, form the mantle and inner-core of OK Computer’s microcosmic world, so to speak – and are essential to holding together the fabric of OK Computer’s overall project and message: That we live lives that are increasingly governed by automated systems, and that we are increasingly dependent on technology that was at one time only meant to be assistive.

“Fitter Happier” is a frightening and prescient examination of a world governed by algorithms. The computer knows what we want, because it has told us what we want, and we know what we want, because the computer said so. Yet we love the machines, because we have come to believe the machines love us in turn – and they only want what is best for us, surely? We have deluded ourselves into believing that computers and algorithms care for us, and not that a computer is only as good as the data you feed into it and what you tell it to do with that data – and if you tell a computer that its goal is to generate as much profit as possible, by any means necessary, then that computer will do just that. It will learn. It will adapt. It will get smarter.

In many ways, “Fitter Happier” feels like a warning about what was to come in the next two decades: A world where computer algorithms and black boxes harvest information about us and reduce us to products, products to whom our own identities are sold back to us at an inflated price.

Calm. Fitter. Healthier. And more productive.

Pigs. In cages. On antibiotics.